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The United Nations and the WSA Passport

By Garry Davis

The United Nations is an assemblage of sovereign nations bound by a charter which guarantees the national sovereignty of each of its members. That charter does not provide sovereignty to the United Nations as such. No nation relinquishes any part of its sovereignty to the United Nations on becoming a member.

The U.N. secretariat is just that, a secretariat. It has no mandate to make decisions of a political, economic, social, cultural or legal nature. Its secretary general is strictly bound by the decisions of the Security Council in which the five permanent members-the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China-have an absolute veto over any proposal. As the current secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, himself asserts, "The U.N. has no army, no money, no infrastructure. The U.N. is a kind of symbol, a forum. If [member-states] are not able to work together, the U.N. can do nothing!" (See World Citizen News, Vol. IX, No. 4.)

The U.N. General Assembly has a strictly advisory function. It is not a legislative body. It is made up of diplomats appointed by each member-state. No individual citizen is represented by the General Assembly. None of its decisions have the power of law, much less world law. It is a smoke screen behind which each sovereign nation carries on its separate policies.

The United Nations has no authority to issue passports. Even its affiliated agency, the High Commission for Refugees, has no authority to issue passports to any of the 43 million refugees throughout the world. Nor does the U.N. have the authority either to condone or condemn passports of any kind, national or otherwise. To its own personnel, it issues a travel document known as a laissez-passer.

The primal U.N. document pertaining to human rights is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was proclaimed as a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations" by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. While there is no mention of passports or visas in the document, Article 13(2) refers to the freedom of travel: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

The World Service Authority issues the only passport that conforms strictly to this specified right. Though the passport derives from a United Nations document, the U.N. itself, as a mere assemblage of sovereign nations, can neither recognize nor reject it. Should any U.N. official say something to the effect that "the U.N. does not recognize the WSA passport," such a statement will immediately stand revealed as an oxymoron since the United Nations is a nullity in itself.


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